The news follows the Vatican’s announcement last month that the pope will travel to Malta on April 2-3.
Pope Francis will become the first pope to visit South Sudan, which became the world’s newest country when it declared independence from the Republic of the Sudan on July 9, 2011. The nation in east-central Africa has a population of 11 million people, around 37% of whom are Catholic.
In 2019, Pope Francis brought South Sudanese leaders together at the Vatican for a “spiritual retreat” aimed at resolving their differences.
The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is expected to join the pope in Juba, along with the moderator of the Church of Scotland, Jim Wallace.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a Central African country of around 90 million people, roughly half of whom are Catholic. Pope John Paul II visited the country, then known as Zaire, in 1980.
Pope Francis said in an interview last October that he wanted to visit the Congo in 2022.
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